Conventional systems may define relevancy as the number of hits, the number of checkouts and other past and behavioral information gathered for user activity. In some instances, a simple input, or score, from the user is collected and summarized as a number or another set of symbols like ‘stars’. However, for most people, this type of scoring, or relevancy, of the inquiry or search result lacks the specific information that would most benefit the user. To complicate the issue further, finding relevant information has become increasing more difficult with the sheer volume of information now available on the internet combined with the information being made available on a daily basis on companies' intranet and other systems.
Several traditional, known approaches have been employed in an attempt to improve the relevancy of user input opinions or other data. One approach comprises devising mechanisms to map a user's query to document and concept-based query expansion, while another approach identifies each concept and is expanded to a disjunctive set or group of concepts on the basis of relationships identified by the user. Another known idea is proposed in, “Incremental Relevance Feedback for Information Filtering”, by J. Allen, Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Mass., Amherst, Mass. This concept relates to feedback techniques that factors in shifts of the user interest patterns over a period of time.
Various publications provide certain aspects used in some embodiments of the present invention. These include:                “Incremental Relevance Feedback for Information Filtering”, by J. Allan, Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval Dept. of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Mass.        “Using faces to represent points in k-dimensional space graphically”, Herman Chernoff (1973), Journal of the American Statistical Association 68 (342): 361-368.        
U.S. PATENT PUBLICATION NUMBER 2006/0235860 A1 (which issued as U.S. Pat. No. 7,596,558 on Sep. 29, 2009), by BRETT BREWER, TITLED “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR OBTAINING USER FEEDBACK FOR RELEVANCE TUNING” is hereby incorporated by reference. It describes a system and method for facilitating user feedback pertaining to search results produced by a search system in response to an input user query. The system may include an edit mode activation option provided in conjunction with the search results. The system may additionally include result manipulation tools triggered in response to a user selection of the edit mode activation option, the result manipulation tools allowing the user to manipulate the search results. The result manipulation tools may include a sorting interface for allowing a user to sort search results. The system may further include a feedback receiving mechanism for receiving and storing the user-manipulated search results for future ranking input or search result personalization input. In some embodiments, the sorting interface allows the user to drag and drop results in the selected descending order. Some embodiments further include providing a re-ordering interface including drag and drop capability that allows the user to re-order the search results in descending order based on relevance.
U.S. PATENT PUBLICATION NUMBER 2006/0112099 A1 (which issued as U.S. Pat. No 7,698,279 on Apr. 13, 2010), by TIMOTHY MUSGROVE, PRODUCT FEATURE AND RELATION COMPARISON SYSTEM is hereby incorporated by reference. It describes a method of presenting data regarding products. Feature categories are assigned to each product category based on available data. A weighted importance is assigned to each feature category of each product category based on the available data. The items in the product category are ranked according to the weighted importance of the feature categories of each item, and the evaluation metrics of each feature category.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,256,633, to SHANDA DHARAP, “CONTEXT BASED AND USER PROFILE DRIVEN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL” is hereby incorporated by reference. It describes that a user is enabled to navigate through an electronic data base in a personalized manner. A context is created based on a profile of the user, the profile being at least partly formed in advance. Candidate data is selected from the data base under control of the context and the user is enabled to interact with the candidates. The profile is based on topical information supplied by the user in advance and a history of previous accesses from the user to the data base.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,089,237, to DONALD TURNBULL, “INTERFACE AND SYSTEM FOR PROVIDING PERSISTENT CONTEXTUAL RELEVANCE FOR COMMERCE ACTIVITIES IN A NETWORKED ENVIRONMENT” is hereby incorporated by reference. It describes a search and recommendation system that employs the preferences and profiles of individual users and groups within a community of users, as well as information derived from categorically organized content pointers, to augment electronic commerce related searches, re-rank search results, and provide recommendations for commerce related objects based on an initial subject-matter query and an interaction history of a user. The search and recommendation system operates in the context of a content pointer manager, which stores individual users' content pointers (some of which may be published or shared for group use) on a centralized content pointer database connected to a network. The shared content pointer manager is implemented as a distributed program, portions of which operate on users' terminals and other portions of which operate on the centralized content pointer database. A user's content pointers are organized in accordance with a local topical categorical hierarchy. The hierarchical organization is used to define a relevance context within which returned objects are evaluated and ordered.
U.S. PATENT PUBLICATION NUMBER 2006/0101017 A1 (which issued as U.S. Pat. No. 7,426,499 on Sep. 16, 2008), by JEFFREY EDER, “SEARCH RANKING SYSTEM” is hereby incorporated by reference. It describes a computer-based media, method and system for prioritizing search results for an individual, a group, a team, a division, an organization or some combination thereof.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,096,214, to KRISHNA BHARAT, “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR SUPPORTING EDITORIAL OPINION IN THE RANKING OF SEARCH RESULTS” is hereby incorporated by reference. It describes a server that improves the ranking of search results. The server includes a processor and a memory that stores instructions and a group of query themes. The processor receives a search query containing at least one search term, retrieves one or more objects based on the at least one search term and determines whether the search query corresponds to at least one of the group of query themes. The processor then ranks the one or more objects based on whether the search query corresponds to at least one of the group of query themes and provides the ranked one or more objects to a user.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,031,961, to JAMES PITKOW, “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR SEARCHING AND RECOMMENDING OBJECTS FROM A CATEGORICALLY ORGANIZED INFORMATION REPOSITORY” is hereby incorporated by reference. It describes a search and recommendation system employs the preferences and profiles of individual users and groups within a community of users, as well as information derived from categorically organized content pointers, to augment Internet searches, re-rank search results, and provide recommendations for objects based on an initial subject-matter query. The search and recommendation system operates in the context of a content pointer manager, which stores individual users' content pointers (some of which may be published or shared for group use) on a centralized content pointer database connected to the Internet. The shared content pointer manager is implemented as a distributed program, portions of which operate on users' terminals and other portions of which operate on the centralized content pointer database. A user's content pointers are organized in accordance with a local topical categorical hierarchy. The hierarchical organization is used to define a relevance context within which returned objects are evaluated and ordered.
U.S. PATENT PUBLICATION NUMBER 2006/0218146, ELAN BITAN, “INTERACTIVE USER CONTROLLED RELEVANCE RANKING INFORMATION IN AN INFORMATION SEARCH SYSTEM” is hereby incorporated by reference. It describes an apparatus and system for providing an ability to conduct a secondary search using results provided by a first search capability. This secondary search is integrated with the first search and functions as an added tool or accessory. The present invention allows for user control of search ranking, search viewing and search presentations thus affording more relevant information retrieval. Searchers can dynamically and interactively examine and manipulate the search results to improve relevance and quickly satisfy their search objectives.
U.S. PATENT PUBLICATION NUMBER 2006/0206505 (which issued as U.S. Pat. No. 7,680,855 on Mar. 16, 2010), by ADAM HYDER, “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR MANAGING LISTINGS” is hereby incorporated by reference. It describes a computer system and method for capture, managing and presenting data obtained from various often unrelated postings via the Internet for examination by a user. This system includes a scraping module having one or more scraping engines operable to scrape information data sets from listings on the corporate sites and web sites, direct feeds, and other sources, wherein the scraping module receives and stores the scraped listing information data sets in a database. The system also has a management platform coordinating all operation of and communication between the sources, system administrators and processing modules. The processing modules in the platform include scraping management module analyzing selected scraped data stored in the database, and a categorization module that examines and categorizes each data set stored in the database into one or more of a predetermined set of categories and returns categorized data sets to the database.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,904,455, to ROBERT YEN, “METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR PROVIDING LOCAL CONTENT FOR USE IN PARTIALLY SATISFYING INTERNET DATA REQUESTS FROM REMOTE SERVERS” is hereby incorporated by reference. It describes improved techniques for data delivery from a server machine to client machines through a network. The techniques reduce the demands on connection bandwidth between the client machines and the network, and thus enable media-rich data to be delivered with reduced amounts of network bandwidth. The techniques also reduce the bandwidth demands on network servers and overall network infrastructure.
Other background for the present invention can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 6,256,633 “CONTEXT-BASED AND USER-PROFILE DRIVEN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL,” and U.S. Pat. No. 6,735,568 “METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR IDENTIFYING PEOPLE WHO ARE LIKELY TO HAVE A SUCCESSFUL RELATIONSHIP,” which are hereby incorporated by reference.
What is needed is an improved method and apparatus to increase the relevancy of search results and to allow improved analysis of data that is collected.